In Praise of Cinema for Grown-Ups
Jacques Audiard's "Les Olympiades" show the beauty of not catering to the PG-13 rating
A recent New Yorker piece entitled “How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood” provides a new confirmation of the various phenomena that anyone who cares about film has noticed for years. The franchise has sucked up the air of US cinema in various ways, from absorbing talented actors and directors into multi-year commitments to the creation of a theatrical market in which only franchise films are viable. The piece also points to the ways in which Marvel appropriates the aesthetics and mechanisms of other genres and traditions, to which I would add that it does not give back to them. The vast audience of Shang-Chi will not watch Chinese wuxia films, in part because the business of Disney is predicated on a global footprint that preempts other traditions to develop their own cinema (you could buck this and at least watch the stunning 4K restoration of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in disc and streaming). This is why I reject the celebration of Coco or Encanto: ideas of Mexico and Colombia manufactured by a US corporation as Latin Americans filmmakers and creators can barely open films in their own countries. To be clear, my problem is not so much that these products exist, but rather the way in which alternatives are foreclosed: it is increasingly difficult to see quality global films in a theater unless one lives in New York. And, unless one has the ability to subscribe to a dozen platforms, no average viewer is going to shun Netflix and Disney+ to get MUBI and The Criterion Channel.
Beyond the issues one can raise regarding the performance of diversity within media empires, it has become striking to see the decreasing importance and quality of US cultural products for adults. HBO is still producing some of this fare—Euphoria is one example of good quality output, while The Idol tries so hard to be controversial that it results in a lot of boredom and silliness. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that the Max platform is geared towards a machinery based to monetize the Harry Potter and DC Comics universes, while drawing adults towards HGTV and Magnolia. I know the pushback I get when I make statements like this: people will alternatively dismiss my elitism for disliking the most popular films and TV Shows of the day and provide me with arguments about how great the stuff is (it is not). But beyond the vagaries of taste, and my recognition that my taste is both idiosyncratic and will always differ from many of my very smart media-oriented friends, the cold hard numbers indicate that R-rated films in the US had their lowest market share in years in 2022, while over 50% of the market is geared to PG-13 films. We live under he dictatorship of tween taste.
Motivated by the crabbiness of being in the losing side of a cultural battle, most of my summer watching has been geared towards films that have no investment on the PG-13 status quo. There are some franchises there too—John Wick, Resident Evil—because notwithstanding my elitist purview I do like to be entertained sometimes. This fast-food media is not MCU McDonald’s or DC Comics Burger King, but perhaps Five Guys or Shake Shack.
But generally, I prefer to not spend my media life watching fast casual cinema. In trying to move away from this, the most compelling movies I have seen in the past few weeks grant viewers the possibility of understanding life in its messy, sensual and unidealized versions.
Just last night, I watched Jacques Audiard’s Les Olympiades, translated into English as Paris 13th District, and providentially available in Hulu and AMC+. A side note: almost every platform has great films in it, but whether people take the time to dig and find them is a different matter.
Les Olympiades is the result of a plethora of talent. The director has won the Grand Prix and the Palme D’Or at Cannes for two great films, A Prophet and Dheepan, more invested in social realism. Les Olympiades has two additional screenwriters, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, themselves amongst the most talented filmmakers in the world right now. You can attest to this in Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or Mysius’s The Five Devils. The film is adapted from the graphic short stories of Adrian Tomine, which are truly luminous in their own right. The four actors that carry the film, very different in style from each other, provide the kind of nuanced, exact performance that makes the movie work. The film is shot in black and white by cinematographer Paul Guillaume, giving it a feeling of Nouvelle Vague aesthetics punctured by the social elements of the film.
I won’t spoil the film, after all I want people to watch it (but do be advised that it is quite sexual, since I realize some people do not like that). The reason why I find it so admirable is because it grabs a material from a talented US creator and takes it into directions that would be hard to find in a US film. The cast is very diverse. The film is shot in the Asian quarter of Paris, and some of the dialogue is in Mandarin. The four protagonists are, respectively, a black man, a young Chinese woman, a white cis woman and a white queer woman. But the remarkable thing about this diversity is that it is completely matter of fact. There is not line of dialogue in the film in which a character telegraphs their identity, not pedagogical framing or race for audiences, no melodramatic mise-en-scène of difference. Race is there, throughout the film, and one can plausibly read some of the conflict in the film as deriving from its frictions. Yet, the film does not feel the need to give us a pedagogical lesson about it. It is almost utopian to see a film that does not feel the need to perform the virtuosity of itself, but rather capture a diverse society that is always already there.
At the same time, the film has a very frank and explicit representation of the sexuality and desire in a way that is both deeply sensual and subtly troubling. I do not remember the last time I saw a US film using sex in such an intelligent way. You can see how illegible this sexuality is to the US film establishment in the title of the New York Times review of the film: “groping towards happiness.” Whoever wrote this idiotic title misses the point of Manohla Dargis’s intelligent review, which renders visible the fact that the film’s racial diversity is shot against the backdrop of Marine Le Pen’s presidential run, perhaps as a rebuke. This reading points to the fact that you don’t have to spell out your politics in explanatory dialogue to be political—a standard under which a lot of US films fail these days.
At its best, Les Olympiades shows that not being explicit about its controversies is a way to treat your audience as adults. Instead of jarring us with maximalist moral dilemmas or dissolving itself into a rom-com for a broad audience, the film opts for showing us a deeply beautiful view of young adulthood compounded in part by the mess of sexual desire and the ugliness of undecided feelings. The film works because it does not judge its characters, but rather shines their human imperfections with love and a clear sense of how gorgeous the people who populate the 13th arrondissement are.
There are more of these films out there. One can think of Hong Sang Soo’s The Novelist’s Film, in which the messy character of human relations is wrapped, as in many of his films, with the anxieties of an artist facing a creative crisis. Or Davy Chou’s bold Return to Seoul, in which the protagonist’s search for her roots is taken into a wild journey that completely upends the conventions of such narratives. The summer awaits with many of these films, oftentimes hidden in the corners of mainstream platforms or in platforms that are hidden themselves. But there is a choice to not spend one’s time with the bad film or TV show du jour that one is pushed to watch by FOMO or social media overhyping. Hopefully more people will seek this refuge, as the tyranny of tween taste gives us an unnecessary remake of the Harry Potter series, a ghastly third Deadpool film or whatever half-baked failed attempt at a franchise Netflix decides to make. Some filmmakers are there telling stories for grown-ups. I hope that in between MCU binges, some of those viewers arrive to these films.